The other day here, I posted a link to a video of Red Skelton doing a monologue on The Ed Sullivan Show. Here's a message I received from James Curtis…

A bit of trivia about the Red Skelton monologue.

I was in the audience the night this segment was recorded at Television City. It was on a Monday, which, as you know, was the usual night of the Skelton dress rehearsal. No orchestra, just a piano, but otherwise the whole show, apart from the musical numbers and credits. My friend and I had tickets for Jonathan Winters, but then one of the pages appeared with tickets for the Skelton show. I asked who the guest stars were, and he said, "Boris Karloff and Vincent Price." That was all I had to hear.

We got great aisle seats — third or fourth row — with two seats taped off directly behind us. Just before the start of the show, the tape was removed and down the aisle came Ed Sullivan and another man. As Sullivan sat down, I felt his hands on my shoulders and they gave me a squeeze. I turned around and asked him for his autograph, and he asked for my birthday. I said November 16th and he wrote "Hello Jim, and a happy November 16 to you, young fellow." Nice man; I still have it.

I later came to understand that if you wanted Red on your show, you had to come to him. So after the monologue, during which Sullivan emerged from the audience for a little on-stage banter, a replica of Ed's New York set was brought in, new linoleum was laid, Sullivan made the introduction, and out came Red as we see in the clip. I understand the whole episode is on a home video set, and I should probably pick it up for a quick glimpse of my 14 year-old self.

Then James added…

P.S. One thing that stuck with me about that night was that Boris Karloff was obviously quite frail — he died in London about five months later — and that he performed the rehearsal in a wheelchair pushed by a little man wearing a rubber Frankenstein mask. Despite this, he knew his part cold, and although Vincent Price and Skelton were glued to their respective cue cards, Karloff never glanced at his once. And when I watched the air show — which was taped the following night — Karloff did the whole thing on his feet. It was a remarkable show of stamina and professionalism at the very end of a distinguished career, and it later turned out to be a valuable thing for me to have witnessed.

I have seen that kind of professionalism now and then. I'm not sure if there are as many comparable tales of non-performers rising to those kinds of challenges but there does seem to be something about being in front of an audience that brings it out in performers.

Skelton seems to have been one of those stars who had his own odd ways of doing things and you either played by his rules or you didn't play with him. I would guess that Ed Sullivan and/or CBS decided that it would be mutually beneficial to both Ed's show and Red's to have that little crossover and they engineered that. It may not have been that Red insisted they come to him. It might have been that CBS wanted it to happen and Red couldn't fly to New York, do Ed's show and get back without disrupting the taping schedule of his own program.

But maybe Red did insist they come to him. He was on odd guy. Those "dirty hour" rehearsals he insisted on doing for his show cost a lot of time and money but if you wanted The Red Skelton Hour to get taped Tuesday night, you had to let him do that.

As I probably knew once upon a time, the Muppet I identified as a "Cookie Monster prototype" in this video has a name. He's the Beautiful Day Monster, seen above with the late Mr. Hooper. The Beautiful Day Monster is called The Beautiful Day Monster because in one Muppet routine, he ruined a little girl's beautiful day.

He appeared in all sorts of sketches they did, including many on Sesame Street under different names. Sometimes, they reconfigured his appearance a little with add-ons or maybe interchangeable parts. It's kind of like the way the Law and Order TV show used to use Danny Burstein.

Darren Foulds wrote in to note that The B.D.M. in the "Windy" video is, as I certainly recognized, "voiced by Frank Oz, the same as classic Cookie. Beautiful Day and Cookie were designed and built together for a snack food commercial in 1966 that never aired. The Muppet who became Cookie Monster became one of the more famous Muppets while Beautiful Day Monster never quite reached the same level of fame."

I guess it's similar to being one of those cast members on Saturday Night Live who never got a movie deal. Poor Beautiful Day Monster.

This is a monologue by Red Skelton on The Ed Sullivan Show for September 29, 1968. Mr. Skelton broke just about every rule of comedy starting with the one about how a comedian should never laugh at his own jokes…and he was clearly outta his ever-lovin' mind. But there was something so delightful about the man that I love watching him.

In the sixties, I went to one taping of his CBS show and a year or so later, I got into one of his infamous "dirty hour" sessions at CBS. These were supposed to be full dress rehearsals for the show he'd tape a day or two later but by and large, it was just Red telling dirty jokes for an hour.

I further got to hear Red tell dirty jokes when I visited a store in Westwood called Bel-Air Camera. I wrote all about these encounters in this article. The encounters with Red in the camera shop were in 1969 and 1970 so he was about the same age he is in this video…

• We had a high-speed police pursuit on TV here in L.A. the other day and the guy covering it from the helicopter actually said, "Police have determined there's at least one person in the vehicle." I guess in these days of driverless cars, that's not as dumb as it sounds.

Gene Henderson, a beloved figure of Comic-Con International, has left us at the age of 88. Gene was a lifelong comic book fan and a constant presence and participant in Comic-Con. He was a board member, an officer, a director of security, an archivist, the curator of the convention art show, the coordinator of the Russ Manning Promising Newcomer Award…it might be easier to list the things Gene didn't do for Comic-Con.

He and his wife Mary served the con in so many ways and were inseparable until her passing in March of 2016 after close to sixty years of wedded bliss. Some folks referred to them as the Dad and Mom of Comic-Con or at least Uncle and Aunt. I thought the great thing about them was how nice and joyful they were to everyone and how they fit in so well with us younger folks. They were not only at every Comic-Con, they could always be found there filling many useful, helpful functions. Just great people.

A fun piece from Jimmy Fallon's show the other night…

Okay, it's 1967 — my freshman year in high school — and I have a crush on a certain young lady who's in several of my classes. She's a big fan of a group that's then in vogue called The Association…so I become a big fan of The Association. Sitting here today, I can recall several memorable tunes recorded by The Association and they'll be popping up later in this series. But what I can't recall is ever knowing anything at all about The Association.

I couldn't tell you the name of a single person in the group. I couldn't tell you how many of them there were or where any of them came from. I'm not sure I ever saw them perform on TV. I was became a fan of them because she was a fan of them and I wound up liking some of their songs enough to include them on my mixtape.

Wikipedia tips me to one reason I didn't know who was in the group. The membership was constantly changing. It also tells me that "Windy" topped the Billboard Hot 100 on July 1, 1967 and stayed there for four consecutive weeks. Not bad.

Here's some assemblage of Association band members lip-syncing the record on some TV show.  When I see videos like this, I always wonder if the performers miming to the record are the exact same guys who made it.  When I worked with the Bay City Rollers, current members of the group occasionally had to mouth the words to records they weren't on…

And as a bonus, I also liked the various versions of this song performed by The Muppets. Here's one from Sesame Street featuring what I guess is an early prototype of Cookie Monster…

• Seems to me that when Trump says he'll be reinstated as Prez by August, it means he expects criminal indictments by August and wants to start the drumbeat that they're fake charges to keep him from his rightful office. And his fans should donate for his legal defense.

The nominations for this year's Eisner Awards were announced this morning and a nomination went to Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips: Volume 7: Pockets Full of Pie. The category is "Best Archival Collection/Project — Strips." All of us folks toiling down here in the Okefenokee Swamp appreciate it. It is a great honor to be nominated. It is even a greater honor to win but if we don't win, we will settle for the great honor of being nominated and pretend that's good enough.

If you have not bought this book, buy this book. Thank you.

So just what is Critical Race Theory?  Here's one thing I think about it: Like "global warming" and "defund the police," it's one of those topics that is so poorly named, it almost invites people to misunderstand it.  For one thing, the people who are fighting to not have it taught in schools want to deny not the theory part of it but the history part of it.

As you may know, I'm somewhat obsessed with the movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which was shot mostly in 1962 and released in November of 1963. In 1974, its producer-director Stanley Kramer hosted a series with him interviewing various folks from the film business. For this one, he chats with three of the stars from Mad World — Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters and Buddy Hackett…

• I wish my iPhone had a setting I could enable so that when I touch anything that causes it to call another phone, a little window pops up and asks, "Are you sure you want to make this call?" And then I have to confirm before it makes the call.

• If you're a pornstar, your non-pornstar name is the first name your parents gave you plus the family name.

Beginning June 22nd, you'll be able to hear the Secret Origins of Comic-Con International on a Sirius XM radio podcast mini-series called Comic-Con Begins. In fact, you'll be able to listen to it for free even if you don't subscribe to Sirius XM radio. It'll be in six parts with bonus episodes later.

A nice, smart gent named Mathew Klickstein interviewed dozens of us who were at or around the early Comic-Cons and I suspect there will be overtones of Rashomon in there. He wisely lassoed the lovely actress Brinke Stevens to do the narration and you'll hear her, you'll hear us and you'll hear audio artifacts (excerpts from speeches, commercials, etc.) that will give you some sense of how and why this astounding annual-when-there's-no-pandemic event came to be.

One educational point! I suspect a lot of folks who gripe how Comic-Con used to be just about comics and is now about movies will be amazed to learn the following: That it was always trying to be somewhat about movies…and science-fiction and other related arts.

When we get closer to 6/22, I'll tell you how and where to hear it. Right now, you can listen to a brief teaser over on this page.

I'll confess here that the teaser makes me a teensy bit worried that the documentary will lean a bit too far into a notion that has long bothered me about comic book fandom. It's this acceptance — to the point of almost sounding like a brag — that we are a merry band of misfits and outcasts from society who found each other. It's the caricature of comic fans (or s-f fans or Star Trek fans, etc.) as bespectacled guys who live in their parents' basement, confuse fantasy with reality and couldn't get laid to save their pathetic lives.

I don't like words like nerd and geek and dweeb. I don't like hearing them applied to any group, especially one that includes me and my friends.

In a lifetime perhaps longer than yours of being around people who get described as such I've never felt it was valid…or at least any more valid than it was of any assemblage of folks of like specialized interests. When I was in high school, it was as true of the males at University High who didn't read comics as it was of the ones who did. There were some who if you made an 80's teen comedy film about them should have been played by my pal Eddie Deezen…but not many.

I really don't get why so many of my fellow followers of comics and allied art forms seem to self-identify with that view of us. Humility can be a good thing but I don't think it's healthy to think of one's self as a permanent member of some loser breed. In and around comics, I have met people who are brilliant…and not even just brilliant at comics — brilliant at whatever they've chosen to do in life.

Every year when there's Comic-Con, I get a few calls and e-mails from strangers and near-strangers who want to know if I can get them in. Last time there was Comic-Con, one fellow called me and asked if I could get him passes to "Nerdtown" because he wanted to get his "dweeb" on. Or maybe he wanted to get into "Dweebtown" to get his "nerd" on. I forget. I told him, "Even if I could get you in, I wouldn't."

I'm probably worrying needlessly that the Comic-Con Begins podcast will do that to us. But next time some form of Comic-Con convenes, which is looking more and more like the day after Thanksgiving, someone will. We have to stop letting them do that to us and we really have to stop doing it to ourselves.

My God, my friend Larry Gelman was in a lot of TV shows and movies. I think he guested something like eight times on Barney Miller as different people and he even got an Emmy nomination for one of those appearances.

He was Dr. Bernie Tupperman the urologist on The Bob Newhart Show. He was a member of the weekly poker game on The Odd Couple with Tony Randall and Jack Klugman. He was on three or four episodes of The Monkees. He was Hubie Binder on Maude. He was Officer Bernstein on Eight is Enough. He was on Night Court a half-dozen times.

His IMDB page lists 118 credits for him. I don't think that's even half-complete but if you look over it, you may notice that most of the shows that hired him had him back over and over, often playing different roles. That says something about how reliable an actor he was, about how people liked having him around and how they knew that no matter what the part was, big or small, Larry would do something memorable with whatever they gave him.

Larry was this cute little guy — I'm not sure he was even five feet tall — who always seemed to be happy and pleasant…and working. One reason IMDB doesn't have all his credits is that he did some real small parts in some movies without billing. Another is that he appeared in a couple of cheapo R-rated comedies under other names.

One cheapo R-rated film he did use his real name in was a thing called Slumber Party '57 which I like to say was "Not the worst movie ever made but certainly in the bottom two." I would not have made it past the first three minutes of the videocassette version except that a lady friend of mine was in it…and she was nice enough to tell me when I could fast-forward through scenes she wasn't in.

Also in the film were Larry as a cat burglar and Joe E. Ross as a policeman. Among the many reasons Bridget hated making this movie was that Joe E. Ross, she said, was unable to be on the set with a woman without touching her and suggesting they go someplace where he could touch her more and vice-versa. When she first told me these stories, it was before I'd met Larry and I asked her how he was. She said, "Thank heaven for him. He was a perfect gentleman. He even tried to stop the man playing the cop from misbehaving towards us."

Larry died early yesterday morning at the age of 90. He'd been hospitalized for a bad fall and there were complications and…well, a friend of his sent out an e-mail that said that his final audience was his beloved wife Barbara and nine I.C.U. nurses. I'm sure, no matter how much pain he was in, he made them all laugh. Just a delightful man.